Chapter 4

Five years passed.

Claire and Ethan were married. Life for the Dubois and Prescott families had moved on.

Then, one day, Ethan decided it was time. He felt a pang of something – perhaps not guilt, but a sense of responsibility to see what had become of the woman he had condemned. He told himself it was to ensure her "rehabilitation" was complete.

He drove to Maine, Sam accompanying him. Sam, too, felt a duty to check on his sister, though he still believed her punishment had been necessary.

They found The Hollows looking even more dilapidated than they remembered from descriptions.

The Elder greeted them, his eyes glinting with a slyness they didn't quite register.

"She's around," The Elder said, gesturing vaguely. "Been a handful, that one. But she learned."

Ethan and Sam walked through the squalid compound.

Then they saw her.

Rory was near a pile of refuse, struggling with several mangy dogs for a discarded bone.

She was emaciated, her hair matted and filthy, her clothes tattered rags. She looked feral, barely human.

When she saw Ethan and Sam, two tall, authoritative men, approaching, her ingrained trauma responses kicked in.

She dropped the bone, whimpering, and scrambled to her knees, head bowed low.

She began to babble, "Please, master, I be good. I do what you say. Please."

She tried to placate them, her hands outstretched in a gesture of submission. Then, remembering what often appeased The Elder, she started to pull at the rags covering her, offering herself.

Ethan recoiled in disgust. "My God, Rory! What are you doing?"

Sam stared, horrified. "Has she gone mad?"

They had expected to find her humbled, perhaps resentful, but still recognizable. Not this.

They believed she had been sent for "hard labor" and should have been treated with some basic respect due to her background, however fallen. They had no idea of the true nature of Claire's altered directive or The Elder's sadism.

To them, Rory' s behavior was not evidence of horrific abuse, but of her complete "degradation," her "madness," or worse, a manipulative play to elicit pity or to disgust them into leaving her alone.

"She' s putting on an act," Ethan said, his voice hard with revulsion. "Look at her. Utterly shameless."

Sam, though shaken, found himself agreeing. This couldn't be the sister he knew. She must be trying to manipulate them.

Rory, hearing the anger in their voices, only became more desperate to appease. This was the cycle she knew. Anger meant pain. Appeasement might lessen it.

She didn't understand their words, only the tone.

Her past life, her identity as their sister or fiancée, was a fog. These were masters to be obeyed.